Do I have this straight?

A friend sent me the following email:

HIS FATHER WAS A BLACK AFRICAN MUSLIM FROM KENYA. WE HAVE
SEEN PICTURES OF HIS AFRICAN FAMILY.

HIS MOTHER WAS A WHITE AMERICAN ATHEIST FROM KANSAS. WHERE
ARE THE PICTURES OF HIS AMERICAN FAMILY?

HIS FATHER DESERTED HIS MOTHER WHEN HE WAS ONLY TWO YEARS
OLD AND WENT BACK TO AFRICA BY WAY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
HOW? WAS HIS FATHER WEALTHY?

HIS MOTHER MARRIED AN INDONESIAN MUSLIM AND THEN MOVED TO
JAKARTA WHERE HE WAS ENROLLED IN A MUSLIM SCHOOL.

WHEN HE REACHED HIGH SCHOOL AGE HIS MOTHER SENT HIM TO
HAWAII TO BE WITH HIS WHITE GRANDPARENTS AND HE WAS PUT
INTO AN EXPENSIVE PRIVATE SCHOOL. HE LATER WENT TO HARVARD
UNIVERSITY. HOW? WERE HIS GRANDPARENTS RICH?

HE LIVES IN A $1.4 MILLION HOUSE OBTAINED THROUGH A DEAL
WITH A WEALTHY FUNDRAISER. HOW?

HE ‘WORKED’ AS A CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST IN CHICAGO.
HE HAS NEVER HELD A PRODUCTIVE JOB OR RECEIVED A PAY CHECK
THAT WAS NOT GOVERNMENT-FUNDED AND/OR TAXPAYER SUPPORTED.

THE PRESIDENCY IS NOT A CIVIL RIGHTS POSITION, NOR IS IT
SUBJECT TO AFFIRMATIVE ACTION SET ASIDES; ON-THE-JOB
TRAINING WON’T CUT IT.

HE ENTERED POLITICS AT THE STATE LEVEL AND THEN THE
NATIONAL LEVEL WHERE HE HAS MINIMAL EXPERIENCE.

HE IS PROUD OF HIS ‘AFRICAN HERITAGE’ (A FATHER
WHO GOT A GIRL PREGNANT AND DESERTED HER).

WHERE IS THE PRIDE IN HIS ‘WHITE HERITAGE’? (A
MOTHER WHO FLAUNTED CONVENTION AND DID NOT BELIEVE IN GOD).

SOME MIGHT THINK THERE WAS NOT MUCH TO BE PROUD OF EITHER WAY.

HE BELONGS, AND HAS BELONGED FOR OVER 20 YEARS, TO AN
‘AFRO-CENTRIC’ CHURCH IN CHICAGO THAT HATES WHITES,
HATES JEWS, AND BLAMES AMERICA FOR ALL THE WORLD’S
PERCEIVED FAULTS. (INCLUDING CREATING THE AIDS VIRUS IN
ORDER TO INFLICT IT ON AFRICANS).

HE REPEATEDLY WHITEWASHES THE PASTOR, HIS CHURCH AND THE
MEMBERS WHO CHEERED AFTER HEARING VITRIOLIC TIRADES AGAINST
AMERICA.

HE COULD NOT CONFRONT HIS PASTOR BUT HE WANTS US TO BELIEVE
HE CAN CONFRONT NORTH KOREA AND IRAN? YEAH
RIGHT! !

DURING HIS VERY BRIEF TIME IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE HE
HAS MANAGED TO AMASS THE NUMBER ONE ULTRA LIBERAL VOTING
RECORD OUT OF THE ONE HUNDRED MEMBERS.

HE HAS VOTED CONSISTENTLY FOR BIGGER GOVERNMENT AND HIGHER
TAXES. HE HAS VOTED FOR BIG ENTITLEMENTS AND LEGISLATION
THAT WOULD SEVERELY CURTAIL AMERICA’S ABILITY TO FIGHT
TERRORISM AND TO PROTECT OUR BORDERS AND OUR NATIONAL
INTERESTS AROUND THE WORLD.

BUT, HE IS A GOOD ORATOR. ISN’T THAT A COMFORT?

YEAH, I THINK I SEE HOW WELL HE COULD UNITE THE COUNTRY.

I THINK THE TRUTH IS THAT HE HOPES NO ONE WILL PUT THE
PIECES TOGETHER.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO OUR NEW
CHIEF PILOT. HE HAS NEVER FLOWN AN AIRPLANE, IN FACT HE HAS
NEVER EVEN SAT IN THE COCKPIT, BUT HE SAYS HE HAS RIDDEN ON
PLANES BEFORE. WE ARE SURE HE WILL GUIDE US SAFELY THROUGH
THE STORMS WE MAY ENCOUNTER ON THIS FLIGHT.

PEOPLE WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD THE
STORY ABOUT THE WOLF HIDING IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING SO HE
CAN DESTROY THEM FROM WITH-IN? THE HAND WRITING IS ON THE
WALL; DO YOU NOT HAVE EYES TO SEE IT?

THINK LONG AND HARD BEFORE YOU VOTE FOR THIS GUY OBAMA!

Is Obama Having Trouble Raising Money?

Rick Moran
No one would have thought it possible a few months ago when Obama was raking in $40 million a month. But all signs from the Obama campaign point to a significant slowdown in fundraising both on the web and from “bundlers.”

Consider some previous months totals for Obama: a high of $54.1 million in February to $40.2 million in March, to $30.1 million in April. And this was at the heighth of the primary campaign.

But in May, Obama was barely able to top McCain’s total of $20.9 million with $21.1 million. And in June, McCain has announced a fundraising total of $22 million while we have yet to hear from the messiah as yet. 

Is it possible that McCain will outraise Obama for June?

Very possible. Obama is apparently having great difficulty getting Hillary Clinton’s big fundraisers on board while his own whales are maxed out. Coupled with a big fall off in his online donations and the once vaunted Obama fundraising machine seems to have hit a snag. 

This would be bad enough but Obama is also trying to help Hillary retire her debt while promising to help the cash strapped Denver Convention Committee who are looking at a $10 million shortfall. 

Oh what a magnificent bit of irony it would be if Obama is forced to spend more time fundraising than campaigning in September and even October if his fortunes don’t turn around soon. The man who flip flopped on public financing elections would end up scrambling for dollars while McCain sails on into the campaign season loaded for bear. He and the RNC have already come up with a $400 million budget for the campaign from all sources. Obama was supposed to have considerably more than that but now it appears that won’t be the case.

Is it his flip flopping? Is it his move toward the center? Is it Hillary donors hanging back? Is it that the shine is off his apple and he’s now seen as just another politician by most voters (if not the press and liberal elites)?

It is probably all of these things plus one more; an overestimation of his own abilities. This seems to be a common theme cropping up more and more as we go along and is typical of inexperienced candidates. 

We can only hope this trend continues. 

Posted at 12:24 PM | Email | Permalink

Obama’s Berlin Gambit

Obama’s Berlin Gambit

By Stephen Brown
FrontPageMagazine.com | 7/11/2008

 

There are no shortcuts to history, but don’t tell that to Barack Obama. In his ongoing campaign to appropriate John F. Kennedy’s aura, the presumptive Democratic nominee has accepted an invitation to speak in Berlin later this month.

 

 

It’s not unusual for American presidential candidates to visit Germany’s capital in an election year. But the venue Obama’s handlers have chosen – Berlin’s symbolic and history-laden Brandenburg Gate – is obviously intended to recall Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in Berlin in 1963. The political subtext is clear: “BHO” is JFK’s political heir.

 

Already, Obama’s planned speech has opened up a political rift in Germany. On the one side is the German Left. Led by Berlin’s socialist-dominated Senate, the city’s ruling body, which invited Obama, they see the invitation as a clever attempt to influence the upcoming American election.

 

On the other side are those who charge that the senator’s desire to speak at the historic monument is an opportunistic scheme to claim a role traditionally reserved for visiting American heads of state. Letting Obama speak at Brandenburg Gate, they argue, would only encourage vote-hungry foreign politicians to exploit the structure’s symbolism and ultimately cheapen its significance.

 

This objection is hard to dispute. Until now, only elected American presidents have made speeches in Berlin. Of these, Kennedy’s 1963 speech, delivered at Berlin’s city hall the year the Berlin Wall went up, is among the best known. Likewise, Ronald Reagan delivered his powerful “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” address in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate. And, at the same historic landmark, Bill Clinton made an equally appropriate “Berlin is free!” oration in 1994.

 

It’s because of the powerful symbolism of the Brandenburg Gate that Obama’s plan to use it as a backdrop has fractured Germany’s conservative-socialist coalition government. Obama’s presumptuousness even prompted German Chancellor Angela Merkel, head of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the coalition, to publically reject the idea last Wednesday. Merkel noted, sensibly, that the edifice has been reserved for elected presidents. She would like to keep it that way.

 

The chancellor also does not want Germany to be accused of meddling in American politics. Merkel’s spokesman has said that she does not want the American election campaign to be transported before the Brandenburg Gate. For that reason, Merkel’s office has asked Berlin’s government to withdraw its invitation.

 

But Berlin’s socialist mayor, Klaus Wowereit, has other ideas. He has told Merkel to essentially mind her own business. As he sees it, Berlin’s Senate, a ruling council of eight senators over which Wowereit presides, had the right to invite Obama. But it is noteworthy that all eight senators belong either to Germany’s socialist or (supposedly) former communist parties, strengthening the impression that their invitation is a thinly disguised ploy by the German Left to aid Obama’s campaign.

 

Germany’s vice-chancellor, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a member of the Socialist Party of Germany, the junior partner in the ruling coalition, is also pressing ahead with plans for the visit. Dismissing Merkel’s concerns, Steinmeier says Obama’s proposed appearance at the German landmark would be nothing more than an expression of German-American friendship. Another socialist party politician has gone even further and accused Merkel of being in league with the Republican Party.

 

Democrats, for their part, have no objection to Obama’s speech. And no wonder: Having Obama appear before an enthusiastic Berlin crowd will boost immensely their strategy to sell the candidate as a new John F. Kennedy. It was Kennedy who made perhaps the most electrifying of the three presidential speeches in Germany’s capital and his defiant proclamation, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” thrown in the faces of communist totalitarians, has kept his memory very much alive in Germany. Now Obama can use it to his advantage.

 

But it is here that Obama’s plan to co-opt the Kennedy legacy may backfire. Spiegel Online has reported that, in contrast to Kennedy’s imperishable words, Obama’s expression for posterity in his speech will be the feebler, “I can listen.” This phrase, according to Spiegel, may turn up repeatedly in his remarks and is meant to reassure Europeans that, unlike George Bush, Obama is willing to engage with them.

 

Perhaps his speech will have that effect. But it may also expose his appearance as nothing more than a campaign photo-op, transforming an extraordinary symbol of the German nation into a mere political prop. And with his words falling far short of those spoken by more inspirational predecessors, Berliners may in the end come to the same realization about Obama as Lloyd Bentsen did about Dan Quayle in their 1988 vice-presidential debate: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

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Stephen Brown is a columnist for Frontpagemag.com. A scholar and former news reporter, his field of expertise is Muslim forced marriages and honor killings. Email him at alsolzh@hotmail.com.

Assorted Nuts

Assorted Nuts

By Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com | 7/11/2008

Jesse Jackson has always been known for his oratory. This week was no different, though for once his words revealed the content of his character and the temperament of the modern leftist warrior.

 

Over a hot Fox News mic, the good reverend whispered his assessment of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. “Barack been [sic.] talking down to black people,” he said. “I want to cut his nuts out.”

 

Seeking to explain his remark, Jackson parried, “My appeal was for the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males [who father children out of wedlock], but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy which would be a corrective action for the lack of good choices that often led to their irresponsibility.”

 

One can only speculate why Jesse Jackson would be enraged by a speech directed at absentee fathers of illegitimate children. But it is not Obama who condescends to blacks when he calls on deadbeat dads to live up to their responsibilities. It is rather Jackson who patronizes blacks, denying their inherent self-control and calling illegitimacy “a structural crisis” that is ultimately “the collective moral responsibility of government.”

 

Had these been Jesse Helms’ dying words, the media would not have missed their sheer violence and historical precedent. The “Strange Fruit” dotting the gallant South had often been castrated as part of the mob’s “lynchcraft.” In the 1960s, the Klan issued very real threats of castration against integrationists.

 

Yet today the far-Left is the home of the most noxious racism. Further explicating himself, Jackson told a reporter Obama “is cutting off his you-know-what with black people.” Polls show Obama receiving 90 percent of black support. Yet there festers a continual debate – exclusively the province of the Left and of black racists – that asks, in the words of Time magazine, “Is Obama Black Enough?” Although the Left assailed Rush Limbaugh for parroting the term, it was the L.A. Times that first coined the phrase “Obama the ‘Magic Negro.’” At the heart of the question is whether the biracial son of a Kenyan father raised in Hawaii and Indonesia truly shared “the African-American experience” (as though there were but one uniform experience of American blacks). CBS’s Steve Kroft famously quizzed the candidate, “You grew up white…yet at some point you decided that you were black?” Salon’s Debra Dickerson even inveighed Obama is not “politically and culturally black.” Other black Democrats have revealed the seedy racialist undertones Obama faces. Cinque Henderson played the miscegenation card in a piece for The New Republic, writing, “Had Barack married a white woman, his candidacy would’ve never gotten off the ground with black people.” Clarence Thomas, a hero of the Right, knows this pain all too well; not only did he marry a white woman, but he dared frame his political views around another legal compass, permanently disqualifying him as “politically and culturally black.” Jesse Jackson’s rhetorical separation of Obama from “black people” should highlight the Left’s obsessive anthropological navel-gazing.

 

More importantly, it should underscore the Left’s viciousness, very much a corporate character trait. Rev. “Hymietown” has exposed his fallen side before. However, his seeming bloodlust – punctuated on video by a head-thrust and hand gesture – is a shared quality of the Left.

 

Commenting of the Jackson flap at the execrable Huffington Post, Dan Sweeney fondly reminisced:

 

A couple months ago, I wrote a blog entry here at HuffPo that ended by calling for the public castration of Grover Norquist. The comments that the good readers of the HuffingtonPost left at that blog entry were strongly approving, especially of the final line.

 

He added:

 

The truly unforgivable part of Rev. Jackson’s words is not what he said, but whom he said it about…Had Rev. Jackson said he wanted to cut the nuts off of Dick Cheney, we’d all be having a good laugh about it right now.

 

In fact, in November 2006, Huffington Post columnist Tony Hendra offered “A Thanksgiving Prayer for Dick Cheney’s Heart – and a Few Other Favorite Things.” The Left repeatedly gloated over Tony Snow’s progressively worsening cancer.

 

When no one is yet ill, the Left often openly vents its bloodlust. In October 2004, UK Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker asked, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. – where are you now that we need you?” While protesting the War on Terror, some leftists carried signs proclaiming, “Bush is the disease. Death is the cure.” Indeed, an entire film has been made – and favorably reviewed – imagining the assassination of President George W. Bush.

 

Nevertheless, Jackson’s comments, and their implicit revelation of the Left’s nature, will not be explained that way; a complicit media will see to that. Instead, the denunciation comes as a godsend to Barack Obama, diverting attention from his most recent gaffe, a pompous (and hypocritical) instruction, “You need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.” (What if we don’t want our children to have to speak Spanish in their own country?) Jackson’s threat aids the two-week-long, cosmetic-if-insincere reinvention of the nation’s most “liberal” senator as a centrist. In a grand turnabout, Sister Souljah repudiated him. Seeing the fallout, the DailyKos observed, “The whole thing looks set up and phony.”

 

On the contrary, there should be no doubt Rev. Jackson’s frustration, racialism and anger were all-too real.

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Ben Johnson is Managing Editor of FrontPage Magazine and author of the book 57 Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Charitable Giving.

U.S. Commanders: Hussein’s Iraq Withdrawal Plan An Idiotic Nightmare

http://patdollard.com/2008/07/us-commanders-hussein-iraq-withdrawal-plan-an-unrealistic-nightmare/